The present invention relates generally to cooking equipment and, in a preferred embodiment thereof, more particularly provides deep fat frying apparatus having an improved under-fryer cooking liquid filtration and pumping system.
The frying in commercial cooking facilities of various food items such as french fries, breaded chicken and fish and the like is conventionally performed using fryer structures that typically comprise at least two large capacity metal frypots operatively supported within an upper portion of a suitable housing. Each of the frypots has a heated upper portion, in which the food is actually fried in a cooking liquid such as oil or melted lard, and an elongated, unheated "cold well" portion which depends from the upper frypot portion and is designed to receive and retain food bits that inevitably fall from the fryer racks. The relatively cooler temperature of the cooking fluid in the unheated wells tends to prevent the fallen food particles from burning and thereby unduly hastening the need to replace the cooking liquid in the frypots with a fresh supply.
It is well known that the useful life of a given batch of cooking liquid may be further extended by periodically draining the oil, filtering the particulate food matter from the drained liquid, and then returning the cleansed liquid to its frypot for further food frying use. Heretofore, the equipment needed to effect this very advantageous filtration process has required a considerable amount of additional operational and/or storage floor space beyond that occupied by the fryer housing, the housing floor space normally being only somewhat greater than the vertically projected floor area of the large capacity frypots. As an example, it has been conventional practice to position the filtration and associated pumping equipment in a separate floor mounted filtration housing built onto one side of the frypot housing. Not only does this require a significant amount of floor space, which is usually at a high premium in most commercial cooking facilities such as fast food restaurants, but also inhibits the ability to add additional frypot sections to the existing frypot housing should business expand or frying needs otherwise increase.
The cooking liquid filtration and pumping system illustrated and described in the aforementioned copending U.S. application Ser. No. 168,164 now U.S. Pat. No. 4,890,548, substantially solves this floor space problem by providing a roll-in cooking fluid receiving container which may be positioned beneath the dual, large capacity frypots and is sized to hold the entire cooking liquid content drained from either of them. A cooking liquid filtration pump is supported on the receiving container for movement therewith, and has a quick disconnect fitting on its outlet which may be coupled to the supply conduit system used to flow cooking liquid drained from the rolled-in container and discharged from the pump outlet. Cooking liquid drained from one of the frypots into the roll-in container is cleaned by a filter structure disposed within the container as the drained cooking liquid is drawn from the container and flowed back into the frypot through the filtration pump and its associated supply conduit system.
In further developing this roll-in filtration/pumping system, it has become desirable to provide it with further improvements relating, for example, to filter cleaning access, quick connection of the pump to the supply conduit system, cooking liquid supply to the frypots, and the like. It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide deep fat frying apparatus having an under-fryer cooking liquid filtration and pumping system into which these and other further improvements are incorporated.